HANSEN: Where do you think this is going now?
Dr. AL-ASWANY: I think now everything is clear. We have one major problem: that Mr. Mubarak has not been convinced yet to resign. I spent two days and even more with the protestors. And I even made some speeches to the protestors. And nobody wants to hear anything except that Mubarak must go.

Far from trying to transform Egypt into a theocracy, as Arab rulers and western ideologues predicted they would, the Brotherhood fully embraced the principles of democracy by creating political alliances with liberal intellectuals and secular democrats in the Egyptian to lobby for greater political freedoms, including freedom of religion, assembly and speech. Their actions convinced even their staunchest critics that, given the opportunity, they could become a legitimate political force in Egyptian politics, which is why Mubarak turned so violently against them, rounding up their democratically elected members, jailing, torturing and murdering them inside his dank, sadistic prison cells.

In the early 1990s, the Pasadena chapter of Amnesty International worked on behalf of one of those jailed, possibly tortured, Brotherhood sympathizers. It's long past time to see that era come to an end. Don't forget to check in with Amnesty International USA for appropriate Egypt actions!

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Newjack, an absorbing book about roads and their power to change the world.

Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Roads have unparalleled power to impact communities, unite worlds and sunder them, and reveal the hopes and fears of those who travel them.

With his marvelous eye for detail and his contagious enthusiasm, Ted Conover explores six of these key byways worldwide. In Peru, he traces the journey of a load of rare mahogany over the Andes to its origin, an untracked part of the Amazon basin soon to be traversed by a new east-west route across South America. In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS. In the West Bank, he monitors highway checkpoints with Israeli soldiers and then passes through them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and danger borne by both sides. He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their Himalayan valley to see how a new road will affect the now-isolated Indian region of Ladakh. From the passenger seat of a new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in car culture as highways proliferate across China. And from inside an ambulance, he offers an apocalyptic but precise vision of Lagos, Nigeria, where congestion and chaos on freeways signal the rise of the global megacity.

A spirited, urgent book that reveals the costs and benefits of being connected—how, from ancient Rome to the present, roads have played a crucial role in human life, advancing civilization even as they set it back.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

This Martin Luther King Weekend our friends at All Saints Church in Pasadena are celebrating the life of Lydia Wilkins, 1904-2010. I'm not sure when I took this photo of Lydia signing a death penalty petition, perhaps ten years ago when she was a mere 96 years old, but the sight of Lydia with pen in hand was not an unfamiliar one when I was staffing action tables. As the Star-Newsreported, Lydia saw a lot of change in her lifetime, from women getting the vote to the first African-American president and she just kept that pen moving asking for more. More on the gift that was Lydia here.

Keep your pen moving to honor Lydia and Martin Luther King, Jr. The great news out of Illinois is that the state legislature has passed a death penalty abolition bill which now sits on the governor's desk awaiting his signature. You can urge Governor Quinn to sign that bill (and if you live in Illinois, do it early and often!) and take other death penalty actions here.

For a little extra inspiration, check out this clip from a Fox Business News interview with Rights Readers author Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking) made in the wake of the tragedy in Tuscon where she does a little pre-emptive lobbying against the death penalty for Jared Loughner. (Don't let "Fox" scare you, the interviewer closes by calling her a national treasure - I agree!)

After seven years on television and in the op-ed pages, how would you rate your effectiveness in shedding light on Islam?To be honest, you caught me at a weird time. I’ve spent most of this last decade writing books and articles and doing media appearances and working with organizations and interfaith councils. I’ve been essentially doing my best, or at least my duty, in trying to educate people and provide them with the information they need to hopefully reframe their perceptions not just of Islam but the Middle East—a part of the world that has been misunderstood as monolithic and unchanging. And what I’ve concluded over the last three or four months with this unprecedented wave of anti-Muslim sentiment, or Islamophobia—whatever you want to call it that has gripped this country and become disturbingly mainstream—is that I’ve completely wasted my time. I could write a dozen books and do a hundred interviews on every media channel in the world, and I am not going to shape the way people think as effectively as I would if I could just focus on what I really want to do, which is storytelling.

While seeing him this discouraged makes you want to reach out and offer a big ol' Rights Readers solidarity hug, this makes me really curious about what direction he will be headed in at the All Saints event!

Saturday, January 01, 2011

A chilling political thriller set at the end of Peru's grim war between Shining Path terrorists and a morally bankrupt government counterinsurgency.

Associate District Prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a by-the-book prosecutor wading through life. Two of his greatest pleasures are writing mundane reports and speaking to his long-dead mother. Everything changes, however, when he is asked to investigate a bizarre and brutal murder: the body was found burnt beyond recognition and a cross branded into its forehead. Adhering to standard operating procedures, Chacaltana begins a meticulous investigation, but when everyone he speaks to meets with an unfortunate and untimely end, he realizes that his quarry may be much closer to home. With action rising in chorus to Peru’s Holy Week, Red April twists and turns racing toward a riveting conclusion.